The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

By Valerie Kuletz

Book Overview

For decades, nuclear testing in America's southwest was shrouded in secrecy, with images gradually made public of mushroom clouds blooming over the desert. Now, another nuclear crisis looms over this region: the storage of tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste. Tainted Desert maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415917719
• ISBN13: 9780415917711
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

One of the most important books on the environment.

For anyone who is at all interested in the environment, or the American West, or issues of nuclear waste, this book is a must. Kuletz does something that is lacking in our radio, t.v., news magazine, and newspaper reports on environmental issues--she reveals the cultural biases in our Western, "objective" perspective. She also listens and presents the testimony of Native Americans on their desert homelands. This belongs on the bookshelf with Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ and Carole Gallagher's _American Ground Zero_.